How Wagon Cooks Transformed Tough Cuts Of Meat To Feed Hungry Cowboys In The Old West

It wasn't easy being a cowboy. Polished and glamorized over the years into a symbol of all-American masculinity, a real cowboy was less likely to lose his life in a gunfight at high noon and more likely to get injured in a stampede during a cattle drive. It was tough living, and the food they ate was sometimes just as tough. That's why cowboy cooks (or "cookies") often made chili to make use of otherwise unpalatably chewy cuts of meat.

David Davis, chief curatorial officer at the National Cowboy Museum, told The Takeout that chili was one of the staple foods real cowboys ate in the Old West. "Mexican cooks on the trail, especially those coming out of Texas, used many Mexican influences, such as spices and chilis." By taking some of the toughest, cheapest cuts of meat that they had to work with, like the chuck, and braising them in a pot with chile peppers, cookies could make a satisfying, no-fuss dinner perfect for hungry cowboys. Interestingly, although chuck is a common cut of beef to use for chili, that's not necessarily why the wagons carrying cowboy provisions were called "chuck wagons" — "chuck" was used as a general slang term for food, whereas "chuck" as a cut of beef came from the word "chunk."

If you went back in time to a cattle drive and sat around the fire for a bowl of chili, you would find that it doesn't quite resemble the sour cream-laden chili concoction you'll often find today. (Also, you should probably watch out for the occasional food poisoning.) Cowboy chili mostly took the form of what chili purists today call a "bowl of red," which is nothing more than chunks of beef stewed with peppers until a thick red gravy forms. There were no tomatoes, no tortilla chips (which are also a good chili thickener), and no sour cream.

On the other hand, there may very well have been beans. Beans were another staple food for cowboys (as that one scene in "Blazing Saddles" memorably demonstrated), and if the cookie threw in a can of beans along with the chili, they could stretch the meat further and have one less pot to clean as well. Today, chili purists, especially from Texas, swear up and down that beans don't belong anywhere near chili, but cowboys weren't trying to be purists. They were trying to fill their bellies with a long day behind them, and another long day probably ahead of them once they woke up the next morning.